If you want to create your own TED Talk, you only have to follow these six steps 1) Have a vague goal, you don't have time for details; 2) Distract the audience with a non-tangential demonstration; 3) Provide a link to your idea with the latest buzzwords in science; 4) About mid-way give an inspired rhetorical question; 5) Your breathless climax should be a double down on the rhetoric; 6) Finish off with the implication that your audience is what really makes it all possible. How does this work? Here is an example talk:
- Vague goal: You want to cure illiteracy while restoring wonder to the world.
- Non-tangential demonstration: You perform a magic trick you learned once as a child.
- Tenuous scientific link: You claim that the ball that disappeared from your hand and was pulled from an audience member's ear actually represents the quantum foam.
- Inspired rhetorical question: “What if instead of one ball, there were a thousand? Or a million? Or one ball for every illiterate child in the world?”
- Breathless climax: “Okay now imagine two.”
- Finale: “This just goes to show that many large groups of passionate people with unlimited resources can make magic happen.” Bow to thunderous applause. Exit juggling.
Note: For more on form and specific vocabulary, Stephen Warnicke did a mind-blowingly awesome TED Talk on that.